permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

John S. wrote:
> What [the taro farmer] had that was most valuable was
> his living, embodied knowledge of his soil, plants, weather and so on - a
> computer would only get in his way in that realm.

and Larry L. responded:
>He needs an interpreter to observe,
>understand and record his knowledge as best he can, someone like Mollison,
>who could put it into print,


John's taro farmer passed his knowledge on, I imagine, to local people who
could make the best use of it, and for that kind of
knowledge/wisdom/experience, direct teaching is far more valuable than, for
example, having a Mollison condense it into a paragraph buried in a
(horrendously indexed!) design manual (sorry, Larry; I exaggerate for
effect). Writing something down strips it away from context, and can
irreversibly change its meaning. For example, I have a computer, and I
write down an awful lot of stuff I know in it, but the "wisdom" I've
gathered over my life, if any, is only going to be passed on to someone
hanging around with me. I couldn't even teach it directly if I tried.
There's a hierarchy that goes "data-knowledge-wisdom" and each level
becomes more difficult to communicate without direct, primary experience. I
rarely feel I "know" something until I've done it, not simply read about
it. It took me years, no matter how many books I read, to learn precisely
when to harvest my pears so they would store well, and it took an old
orchardist to show me: they had to feel a certain way, come off the tree
when you lifted them with a certain soft snap.

We often think we've captured something once it's written down, but writing
is a terrible Procrustean bed, cutting so much that is alive out of what
people know (a very good book, "The Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram,
covers these issues beautifully, as well as words can). I'm glad we have
writing-I do it for a living-since it serves very well to standardize
information, but it is also a powerful leveler, bulldozing cultural
nuances. In a literate culture anything that doesn't lend itself easily to
being encoded via writing gets relegated to some less-important status, and
sometimes doesn't get considered at all. Writing is so powerful that it
often supplants other forms; witness the lack of oral tradition in our
culture. And I fear computers are even more powerful at this demolition,
because it's easy to think they can do everything (wow, text plus image
plus sound!). I know most permaculturists are aware of these issues. The
evolution of the design course (not that again!) into a very experiential
format shows the importance of multiple ways of learning; only a few ideas
can be condensed perfectly into 2-D words, spoken or written.

Toby